"Silver Sparrow," by Tayari Jones

Many thanks to my good friend SB, a regular reader and supporter of this blog, for recommending the novel “Silver Sparrow” (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2011), by Tayari Jones. The book opens with the attention-catching line “My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist,” and everything else in the story spins off from that central fact. James married his wife Laverne when they were both at a very young age, when she became pregnant (and later lost that baby); later he met and fell in love with Gwen, and started his second family. The daughter of his first family, Chaurisse, born a few years after the first baby died, and Gwen’s daughter, Dana, are about the same age. His second family is aware of the first, but not vice versa. Gwen’s and Dana’s lives are consumed by a fascination with and resentment of James’ first family. Dana and Chaurisse get to know each other during their late teen years, and the plot accelerates from there. Other major characters are Raleigh, James’ ever-present best friend who is as close as a brother, and who quietly adores Gwen, and the girls’ grandmother, Miss Bunny, who raised both James and Raleigh. The main story (not counting brief background information about James and Raleigh as children) takes place over a period of about 40 years, from the late 1950s/early 1960s to the year 2000 (the latter in a brief epilogue); the characters are African American and live in Atlanta. The reader might expect James to be the "bad guy" of the story, and in a way he is, but one cannot help feeling compassion for, and even admiration of, this responsible and dependable (aside from the obvious!) and a bit nerdy man who is trying to do right by both wives and daughters, and everyone else as well. The first half of the book tells the story from Dana’s perspective, and the second half through Chaurisse’s eyes. The book is suffused with the duality of the two families, two wives, two daughters, two perspectives. The novel has much to say about marriage, about males and females, about parenthood, about young African American girls, about female friendship, about middle class African American life, about honesty and dishonesty, about living up to one’s responsibilities and how complex that can be, about pride, and much more. This novel tells a compelling story, with compelling characters, and leaves the reader with much to think about, including the fact that almost no moral decisions are completely right or wrong, good or bad, but always encompass various shades of grey.